On the spot: adventures on chocolate biodiesel

Andy Pag reports on his chocolate-powered journey to Timbuktu.

By the time we reached Mopti, in northern Mali, the wing of our Ford Iveco lorry was hanging on by a rusty thread as we rattled over potholes at 45mph. Anyone who knows anything about lorries will tell you a second-hand Ford Iveco will struggle to get you to the end of the road, let alone from Poole to Timbuktu. But, salvaged from a scrapyard, it was our transport for the journey across the Sahara Desert to Bamako to deliver a biodiesel processing unit to a local charity. If that was not bad enough, our only fuel for the journey was made from waste chocolate.

Biodiesel has had a bad press, with stories of farmers destroying rainforests to grow biofuel crops. But our fuel was made from oil produced from waste cocoa butter, which Greenpeace assured us was the right thing to use. Ecotec, our sponsor, can create two million litres of biodiesel a year from just one chocolate factory.

Of course, customs officers in Spain, Morocco and Mauritania had been only too keen to question us about the fuel, but as we headed south the cost of answering them changed from wasted time to folded bank notes, discreetly passed in handshakes or tucked into passports.

In southern Mauritania a sandstorm blew up, reducing visibility to less than 100 yards, and buffeting winds added to the looseness of the steering. But any complaints seemed trivial when a few days later a French family was gunned down along this road in an attack by Taliban fundamentalists, triggering the cancellation of the Paris-Dakar rally. The incident was impossible to reconcile with the friendly and open welcome we had received in Mauritania.

Bamako, the capital of Mali, is buzzing with mopeds and about as unlikely a place as any to find someone aiming to save the world. Ibrahim Togola runs MFC, a charity whose research into oil from the jatropha plant may yet revolutionise the biofuels industry and the way we all travel. We brought him a biofuel production unit for the project that had the bonus of offsetting 30 times the carbon we emitted on our journey.

With just 300 miles to go to Timbuktu, our 2,000 litres of biodiesel was running precariously low. After Bamako the tarmac turns into a rough track on which the Iveco would have stood no chance. So we rolled a Landcruiser off the back and fuelled it up with every last drop, setting off with a light foot on the accelerator and Ali Farka Toure blaring from the one working speaker.

Soon the road turned to soft sand, dust billowed in through the rust holes and we were left little choice but to accelerate harder or be buried. Even in this isolated stretch of desert, the route is marked with milestones: "Timboktou 100km". At 30km the fuel warning light came on.

When we quietly rolled into Timbuktu, we were too tired to be elated. But by the time we backed on to the ferry across the Niger at dusk, we were plotting our next carbon-neutral adventure: to China by paramotor (motorised paraglider) fuelled by landfill waste. All we need to do now is to learn to fly.